A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS.[1]
[Footnote 1: March 1888.]
Nunquamne reponam, Vexatus toties rauci Theseide Codri?
Historians are only too fond of insisting on the effect of the French Revolution in checking English reform. One of the latest of them dwells on the fatal influence of this great event in our own country, in checking, blighting, and distorting the natural progress of things.
But for that influence, he says, the closing years of the century would probably have seen the abolition of the English Slave Trade, the reform of Parliament, and the repeal of the Test Act.[1] The question of the precise degree of vitality in sectarian pride, and of tenacity in a great material interest, a hundred years ago or at any time, is not very easy to settle. It is quite possible that the Slave Trade and the Test Act might have died nearly as hard, if there had been no French Revolution. In any case, it is a curious implication that underlies all writing in this familiar vein, that France ought to have gone on with a bad government, in order to secure to England the advantages of a good one.
[Footnote 1: Lecky, vi. 297.]
As to one disservice, however, there can be no doubt. The French Revolution has furnished the enemies of each successive proposal of reform with a boundless supply of prejudicial a.n.a.logies, appalling parallels, and ugly nicknames, which are all just as conclusive with the unwise as if they were the aptest arguments. Sydney Smith might well put "the awful example of a neighbouring nation" among the standing topics of the Noodle"s Oration. The abolition of rotten boroughs brought down a thousand ominous references to noyades, fusillades, and guillotines. When Sir Robert Peel took the duty off corn, Croker warned him with great solemnity that he was breaking up the old interests, dividing the great families, and beginning exactly such a castastrophe as did the Noailles and the Montmorencis in 1789.
Cobden and Bright were promiscuously likened to Baboeuf, Chaumette, and Anacharsis Clootz. Baboeuf, it is true, was for dividing up all property, and Chaumette was an aggressive atheist; but these were mere _nuances_, not material to the purposes of obloquy. Robespierre, Danton, Marat have been mercilessly trotted forth in their sanguinary shrouds, and treated as the counterparts and precursors of worthies so obviously and exactly like them as Mr. Beales and Mr. Odger; while an innocent caucus for the registration of voters recalls to some well-known writers lurid visions of the Cordeliers and the Jacobin Club.
A recent addition has been made to the stock of nicknames drawn from the terrible melodrama of the last century. The Chancellor of the Exchequer at Dublin described the present very humble writer as "the Saint-Just of our Revolution." The description was received with lively applause. It would be indelicate to wonder how many in a hundred, even in that audience of the elect, had ever heard of Saint-Just, how many in five hundred could have spelt his name, and how many in a thousand could have told any three facts in his career.
But let us muse for a moment upon the portrait. I take down the first picture of Saint-Just that comes to my hand, M. Taine is the artist:--
"Among these energetic nullities we see gradually rising _a young monster_--with face handsome and tranquil--Saint-Just! A sort of precocious Sulla, who at five-and-twenty suddenly springs from the ranks, and _by force of atrocity wins his place!_ Six years before, he began life by an act of domestic robbery: while on a visit at his mother"s, he ran away in the night with her plate and jewels; for that he was locked up for six months. On his release, he employed his leisure in the composition of an odious poem. Then he flung himself head foremost into the revolution. Blood calcined by study, a colossal pride, a conscience completely unhinged, an imagination haunted by the b.l.o.o.d.y recollections of Rome and Sparta, an intelligence falsified and twisted until it found itself most at its ease in the practice of enormous paradox, barefaced sophism, and murderous lying--all these perilous ingredients, mixed in a furnace of concentrated ambition, boiled and fermented long and silently in his breast."
It is, no doubt, hard to know ourselves. One may entertain demons unawares, and have calcined blood without being a bit the wiser.
Still, I do not find the likeness striking. It would have done just as well to call me Nero, Torquemada, Iago, or Bluebeard.
Whether the present writer does or does not deserve all the compliments that history has paid to Saint-Just, is a very slight and trivial question, with which the public will naturally not much concern itself. But as some use is from time to time made of the writer"s imputed delinquencies to prejudice an important cause, it is perhaps worth while to try in a page or two to give a better account of things. It is true that he has written on revolutionists like Robespierre, and destructive thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire. It is true that he believes the two latter to have been on the whole, when all deductions are made, on the side of human progress. But what sort of foundation in this for the inference that he "finds his models in the heroes of the French Revolution," and "looks for his methods in the Reign of Terror"? It would be equally logical to infer that because I have written, not without sympathy and appreciation, of Joseph de Maistre, I therefore find my model in a hero of the Catholic Reaction, and look for my methods in the revived supremacy of the Holy See over all secular and temporal authorities. It would be just as fair to say that because I pointed out, as it was the critic"s business to do, the many admirable merits, and the important moral influences on the society of that time, of the _New Helosa_, therefore I am bound to think Saint Preux a very fine fellow, particularly fit to be a model and a hero for young Ireland. Only on the principle that who drives fat oxen must himself be fat, can it be held that who writes on Danton must be himself in all circ.u.mstances a Dantonist.
The most insignificant of literary contributions have a history and an origin; and the history of these contributions is short and simple enough. Carlyle with all the force of his humoristic genius had impressed upon his generation an essentially one-sided view both of the eighteenth century as a whole, and of the French thinkers of that century in particular. His essay on Diderot, his lecture on Rousseau, his chapters on Voltaire, with all their brilliance, penetration, and incomparable satire, were the high-water mark in this country of the literary reaction against the French school of Revolution. Everybody knows the famous diatribes against the Bankrupt Century and all its men and all its works. Voltaire"s furies, Diderot"s indigestions, Rousseau"s nauseous amours, and the odd tricks and shifts of the whole of them and their company, offered ready material for the boisterous horseplay of the transcendental humourist. Then the tide began to turn. Mr. Buckle"s book on the history of civilisation had something to do with it. But it was the historical chapters in Comte"s Positive Philosophy that first opened the minds of many of us, who, five-and-twenty years ago, were young men, to a very different judgment of the true place of those schools in the literary and social history of Western Europe. We learnt to perceive that though much in the thought and the lives of the literary precursors of the Revolution laid them fairly open to Carlyle"s banter, yet banter was not all, and even grave condemnation was not all. In essays, like mine, written from this point of view, and with the object of trying to trim the balance rather more correctly, it may well have been that the better side of the thinkers concerned was sometimes unduly dwelt upon, and their worse side unduly left in the background. It may well have been that an impression of personal adhesion was conveyed which only very partially existed, or even where it did not exist at all: that is a risk of misinterpretation which it is always hard for the historical critic to escape. There may have been a too eager tone; but to be eager is not a very bad vice at any age under the critical forty.
There were some needlessly aggressive pa.s.sages, and some sallies which ought to have been avoided, because they gave pain to good people.
There was perhaps too much of the particular excitement of the time.
It was the date when _Essays and Reviews_ was still thought a terrible explosive; when Bishop Colenso"s arithmetical tests as to the flocks and herds of the children of Israel were believed to be sapping not only the inspiration of the Pentateuch but the foundations of the Faith and the Church; and when Darwin"s scientific speculations were shaking the civilised world. Some excitement was to be pardoned in days like those, and I am quite sure that one side needed pardon at least as much as the other. For the substantial soundness of the general views winch I took of the French revolutionary thinkers at that time, I feel no apprehension; nor--some possible occasional phrases or sentences excepted and apart--do I see the smallest reason to shrink or to depart from any one of them. So far as one particular reference may serve to ill.u.s.trate the tenour of the whole body of criticism, the following lines, which close my chapter on the "Encyclopaedia," will answer the purpose as well as any others, and I shall perhaps be excused for transcribing them:--
"An urgent social task lay before France and before Europe: it could not be postponed until the thinkers had worked out a scheme of philosophic completeness. The thinkers did not seriously make any effort after this completeness. The Encyclopaedia was the most serious attempt, and it did not wholly fail. As I replace in my shelves this mountain of volumes, "dusky and huge, enlarging on the sight," I have a presentiment that their pages will seldom again be disturbed by me or by others. They served a great purpose a hundred years ago. They are now a monumental ruin, clothed with all the profuse a.s.sociations of history. It is no Ozymandias of Egypt, king of kings, whose wrecked shape of stone and sterile memories we contemplate. We think rather of the grey and crumbling walls of an ancient stronghold, reared by the endeavour of stout hands and faithful, whence in its own day and generation a band once went forth against barbarous hordes, to strike a blow for humanity and truth."[1]
[Footnote 1: Diderot, i. 247.]
It is gratifying to find that the same view of the work of these famous men, and of its relation to the social necessities of the time, commends itself to Mr. Lecky, who has since gone diligently and with a candid mind over the same ground.[1] Then where is the literary Jacobin?
[Footnote 1: See his vol. vi. 305 _et seq_.]
Of course, it is easy enough to fish out a sentence or a short pa.s.sage here and there which, if taken by itself, may wear a very sinister look, and carry the most alarming impressions. Not many days ago a writer addressed a letter to the _Times_ which furnishes a specimen of this kind of controversy. He gave himself the ambiguous designation of "Catholicus"; but his style bore traces of the equivocally Catholic climate of Munich. His aim was the lofty and magnanimous one of importing theological prejudice into the great political dispute of the day; in the interest, strange to say, of the Irish party who have been for ages the relentless oppressors of the Church to which he belongs, and who even now hate and despise it with all the virulence of a Parisian Red. This masked a.s.sailant conveys to the mind of the reader that I applaud and sympathise with the events of the winter of 1793, and more particularly with the odious procession of the G.o.ddess of Reason at Notre Dame. He says, moreover, that I have "the effrontery to imply that the horrible ma.s.sacres of the Revolution ...
were "a very mild story compared with the atrocities of the Jews or the crimes of Catholicism."" No really honest and competent disputant would have hit on "effrontery" as the note of the pa.s.sage referred to, if he had had its whole spirit and drift before him. The reader shall, if he pleases, judge for himself. After the words just quoted, I go on to say:--
"Historical recriminations, however, are not edifying. It is perfectly fair, when Catholics talk of the atheist Terror, to rejoin that the retainers of Anjou and Montpensier slew more men and women on the first day of the Saint Bartholomew, than perished in Paris through the Years I. and II. But the retort does us no good beyond the region of dialectic. Some of the opinions of Chaumette were full of enlightenment and hope. But it would be far better to share the superst.i.tious opinions of a virtuous and benignant priest, like the Bishop in Victor Hugo"s _Miserables_, than to hold these good opinions of Chaumette, as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance, a reckless disregard of the rights and feelings of others, and a shallow forgetfulness of all that great and precious part of our nature that lies out of the domain of the logical understanding.... In every family where a mother sought to have her child baptised, or where sons and daughters sought to have the dying spirit of the old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy to the government which had closed the churches and proscribed the priests. How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate priests ... as they filed before the Convention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude acolytes bearing piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold with which they had once served their holy office."[1]
[Footnote 1: _Misc._ i 77-79.]
Where is the effrontery, the search for methods in the Reign of Terror, the applause for revolutionary models? Such inexcusable perversion of a writer"s meaning for an evanescent political object--and a very shabby object too--is enough to make one think that George III. knew what he was talking about, when he once delivered himself of the saying that "Politics are a trade for a rascal, not for a gentleman."
Let me cite another more grotesque piece of irrelevancy with a similar drift. Some months ago the present writer chanced to express an opinion upon Welsh Disestablishment. Wales, at any rate, would seem to be far enough away from _Emile, Candide_, the Law of Prairial, and the Committee of Public Safety. The _Times_, however, instantly said[1]
that it would be affectation to express any surprise, because my unfortunate "theories and principles, drawn from French sources and framed on French models, all tend to the disintegration of comprehensive political organisations and the encouragement of arrangements based on the minor peculiarities of race or dialect." Was there ever in the world such prodigious nonsense? What French sources, what French models? If French models point in any one direction rather than another, it is away from disintegration and straight towards centralisation. Everybody knows that this is one of the most notorious facts of French history from the days of Lewis XI. or Cardinal Richelieu down to Napoleon Bonaparte. So far from French models encouraging "arrangements based on the minor peculiarities of race and dialect," France is the first great example in modern history, for good or for evil, of a persevering process of national unification, and the firm suppression of all provincial particularismus. This is not only true of French political leaders in general: it is particularly true of the Jacobin leaders. Rousseau himself, I admit, did in one place point in the direction of confederation; but only in the sense that for freedom on the one hand, and just administration on the other, the unit should not be too large to admit of the partic.i.p.ation of the persons concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If the Jacobins had not been overwhelmed by the necessity of keeping out the invaders, they might have developed the germ of truth in Rousseau"s loose way of stating the expediency of decentralisation. As it was, above all other French schools, the Jacobins dealt most sternly with particularist pretensions. Of all men, these supposed masters, teachers, and models of mine are least to be called Separatists. To them more than to any other of the revolutionary parties the great heresy of Federalism was most odious; and if I were a faithful follower of the Jacobin model, I should have least patience with nationalist sentiment whether in Ireland, Scotland, or Wales, and should most rigorously insist on that cast-iron incorporation which, as it happens, in the case of Ireland I believe to be equally hopeless and undesirable. This explanation, therefore, of my favour for Welsh Disestablishment is as absurdly ignorant as it is far-fetched and irrelevant.
[Footnote 1: Nov. 3, 1886.]
The logical process is worth an instant"s examination. The position is no less than this,--that to attempt truly to appreciate the place and the value in the history of thought and social movements of men who have been a hundred years in their graves, and to sympathise with certain sides and certain effects of their activity under the peculiar circ.u.mstances in which French society then found itself, is the same thing as binding yourself to apply their theories and to imitate their activity, under an entirely heterogeneous set of circ.u.mstances, in a different country, and in a society with wholly dissimilar requirements. That is the argument if we straighten it out. The childishness of any such contention is so obvious, that I should be ashamed of reproducing it, were it not that this very contention has made its appearance at my expense several times a month for the last two years in all sorts of important and respectable prints.
For instance, it appears that I once said somewhere that Danton looked on at the doings of his bloodier a.s.sociates with "sombre acquiescence." _Argal_, it was promptly pointed out--and I espy the dark phrase constantly adorning leading articles to this day--the man who said that Danton sombrely acquiesced in the doings of Billaud, Collet, and the rest, must of necessity, being of a firm and logical mind, himself sombrely acquiesce in moonlighting and cattle-houghing in Ireland. Apart from the curious compulsion of the reasoning, what is the actual state of the case? Acquiescence is hardly a good description of the mood of a politician who scorns delights and lives laborious days in actively fighting for a vigorous policy and an effective plan which, as he believes, would found order in Ireland on a new and more hopeful base. He may be wrong, but where is the acquiescence, whether sombre or serene?
The equally misplaced name of Fatalism is sometimes subst.i.tuted for acquiescence, in criticisms of this stamp. In any such sense anybody is a fatalist who believes in a relation between cause and effect.
If it is fatalism to a.s.sume that, given a certain chain of social or political antecedents, they will inevitably be followed by a certain chain of consequences, then every sensible observer of any series of events is a fatalist. Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation, the extension of the franchise, and secret ballot, have within the last sixty years completely shifted the balance of political power in Ireland. Land legislation has revolutionised the conditions of ownership. These vast and vital changes in Ireland have been accompanied by the transfer of decisive power from aristocracy to numbers in Great Britain, and Great Britain is arbiter. Is it fatalism, or is it common sense, to perceive that one new effect of new causes so potent must be the necessity of changing the system of Irish government? To dream that you could destroy the power of the old masters without finding new, and that having invited the nation to speak you could continue to ignore the national sentiment was and is the very height of political folly, and the longer the dream is persisted in the ruder will be the awakening.
Surely the stupidest fatalism is far more truly to be ascribed to those who insist that Ireland was eternally predestined to turmoil, confusion, and torment; that there alone the event defies calculation; and that, however wisely, carefully and providently you modify or extinguish causes, in Ireland, though nowhere else, effects will still survive with shape unaltered and force unabated.
No author has a right to a.s.sume that anybody has read all his books or any of them, but he may reasonably claim that he shall not be publicly cla.s.sified, labelled, catalogued, and placed In the shelves, on the strength of half of his work, and that half arbitrarily selected. If it be permitted to me without excess of egotism to name the masters to whom I went to school in the days of early manhood, so far from being revolutionists and terrorists, they belonged entirely to the opposite camp. Austin"s _Jurisprudence_ and Mill"s _Logic_ and _Utilitarianism_ were everything, and Rousseau"s _Social Contract_ was nothing. To the best of my knowledge and belief, I never said a word about "Natural Rights" in any piece of practical public business in all my life; and when that famous phrase again made its naked appearance on the platform three or four years ago, it gave me as much surprise and dismay as if I were this afternoon to meet a Deinotherium shambling down Parliament Street. Mill was the chief influence for me, as he was for most of my contemporaries in those days. Experience of life and independent use of one"s mind--which he would have been the most ready of men to applaud--have since, as is natural, led to many important corrections and deductions in Mill"s political and philosophical teaching. But then we were disciples, and not critics; and n.o.body will suppose that the admirer of Wordsworth, the author of the Essay on Coleridge, and of the treatise on Representative Government, the administrator in the most bureaucratic and authoritative of public services, was a terrorist or an unbridled democrat, or anything else but the most careful and rationalistic of political theorisers. It was Mill who first held up for my admiration the ill.u.s.trious man whom Austin enthusiastically called the "G.o.dlike Turgot," and it was he who encouraged me to write a study on that great and inspiring character.
I remember the suspicion and the murmurings with which Louis Blanc, then living in brave and honourable exile in London, and the good friend of so many of us, and who was really a literary Jacobin to the tips of his fingers, remonstrated against that piece of what he thought grievously misplaced glorification. Turgot was, indeed, a very singular hero with whom to open the career of literary Jacobin. So was Burke,--the author of those wise sentences that still ring in our ears: "_The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. n.o.body shall persuade me, where a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation._" Burke, Austin, Mill, Turgot, Comte--what strange sponsors for the "theories and principles of the Terror"!
What these opinions came to, roughly speaking, was something to this effect: That the power alike of statesmen and of publicists over the course of affairs is strictly limited; that inst.i.tutions and movements are not capable of immediate or indefinite modification by any amount of mere will; that political truths are always relative, and never absolute; that the test of practical, political, and social proposals is not their conformity to abstract ideals, but to convenience, utility, expediency, and occasion; that for the reformer, considerations of time and place may be paramount; and finally, as Mill himself has put it, that government is always either in the hands, or pa.s.sing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, and shall be, depends less on inst.i.tutions than inst.i.tutions depend upon it. If I were pressed for an ill.u.s.tration of these principles at work, inspiring the minds and guiding the practice of responsible statesmen in great transactions of our own day and generation, I should point to the sage, the patient, the triumphant action of Abraham Lincoln in the emanc.i.p.ation of the negro slaves. However that may be, contrast a creed of this kind with the abstract, absolute, geometric, unhistoric, peremptory notions and reasonings that formed the stock in trade of most, though not quite all, of the French revolutionists, alike in action and in thought. It is plain that they are the direct opposite and contradictory of one another.
To clench the matter by chapter and verse, I should like to recall what, I have said of these theories and principles in their most perfect and most important literary version. How have I described Rousseau"s _Social Contract_? It placed, I said, the centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rational examination of social conditions, and careful and rational effort to modify them. It subst.i.tuted a retrograde aspiration for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law. It overlooked the crucial difficulty--namely, how to summon new force, without destroying the sound parts of a structure which it has taken many generations to erect. Its method was geometric instead of being historic, and hence its "desperate absurdity." Its whole theory was constructed with an imperfect consideration of the qualities of human nature, and with too narrow a view of society. It ignored the great fact that government is the art of wisely dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile pa.s.sions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces. It "gives us not the least help towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government."
Such language as all this is hardly that of a disciple to a master, in respect of theories and principles which he is making his own for the use of a lifetime. "There has been no attempt" [in these pages], I said in winding up, "to palliate either the shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the _Social Contract_. But there is another side to its influence. We should be false to our critical principle, if we do not recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically valueless." Any writer would have stamped himself as both unfit for the task that I had undertaken, and entirely below the level of the highest critical standard of the day, if he had for a moment dreamed of taking any other point of view.
As for historical hero-worship, after Carlyle"s fashion, whether with Jacobin idols or any other, it is a mood of mind that must be uncongenial to anybody who had ever been at all under the influence of Mill. Without being so foolish as to disparage the part played by great men in great crises, we could have no sympathy with the barbaric and cynical school, who make greatness identical with violence, force, and mere iron will. Cromwell said, in vindication of himself, that England had need of a constable, and it was true. The constable, the soldier, the daring counsellor at the helm, are often necessities of the time. It is often a necessity of the time that the energy of a nation or of a movement should gather itself up in a resolute band or a resolute chief; as the revolutionary energy of France gathered itself up in the greater Jacobins, or that of England in Oliver Cromwell. Goethe says that nature bids us "_Take all, but pay_."
Revolutions and heroes may give us all, but not without price. This is at the best, and the best is the exception. The grandiose types mostly fail. In our own day, people talk, for example, with admiration of Cromwell"s government in Ireland,--as if it were a success, instead of being one of the worst chapters in the whole history of Irish failure.
It was force carried to its utmost. Hundreds were put to the sword, thousands were banished to be slaves of the planters in the West Indies, and the remnant were driven miserably off into the desolate wilds of Connaught. But all this only prepared the way for further convulsions and deadlier discontent.
It is irrational to contrast Carlyle"s heroes, Cromwell, Mirabeau, Frederick, Napoleon, with men like Washington or Lincoln. The circ.u.mstances were different. The conditions of public use and of personal greatness were different. But if we are to talk of ideals, heroes, and models, I, for one, should hardly look to France at all.
Jefferson was no flatterer of George Washington; but his character of Washington comes far nearer to the right pattern of a great ruler than can be found in any of Carlyle"s splendid dithyrambs, and it is no waste of time to recall and to transcribe it:--
"His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion. Hence the common remark of his officers, of the advantage he derived from councils of war, where, hearing all suggestions, he selected whatever was best; and certainly no general ever planned his battles more judiciously. But if deranged during the course of the action, if any member of his plan was dislocated by sudden circ.u.mstances, he was slow in a readjustment. He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern. Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circ.u.mstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but when once decided, going through with his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed. His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known; no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the word, a wise, a good, and a great man. His temper was naturally irritable and high toned; but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it."
In conclusion, the plain truth is that all parallels, a.n.a.logies, and similitudes between the French Revolution, or any part or phase of it, and our affairs in Ireland are moonshine. For the practical politician his problem is always individual. For his purposes history never repeats itself. Human nature, doubtless, has a weakness for a precedent; it is a weakness to be respected. But there is no such thing as an essential reproduction of social and political combinations of circ.u.mstance. To talk about Robespierre in connection with Ireland is just as idle as it was in Robespierre to harangue about Lycurgus and Brutus in Paris. To compare the two is to place Ireland under a preposterous magnifying-gla.s.s of monstrous dimension.
Nor is disparity of scale the only difference, vital as that is. In no one of the leading characteristics of a community in a state of ferment, save the odium that surrounds the landlords, and that not universal, does Ireland to-day really resemble the France of a hundred years ago. Manners, ideas, beliefs, traditions, crumbling inst.i.tutions, rising aspirations, the ordering of castes and cla.s.ses, the rivalry of creeds, the relations with the governing power--all const.i.tute elements of such radical divergence as to make comparison between modern Ireland and revolutionary France for any more serious purpose than giving a conventional and familiar point to a sentence, entirely worthless.
It is pure dilettantism, again, to seek the moral of Irish commotions in the insurrection of La Vendee. That, as somebody has said, was like a rising of the ancient Gauls at the voice of the Druids, and led by their great chiefs. It will be time enough to compare La Vendee with Ireland when the peasantry take the field against the British Government with Beresfords, Fitzgeralds, and Bourkes at their head. If the Vendeans had risen to drive out the Charettes, the Bonchamps, the Larochejacquelins, the parallel would have been nearer the mark. The report of the Devon Commission, the green pamphlet containing an account of the famous three days" discussion between O"Connell and b.u.t.t in the Dublin Corporation In 1843, or half a dozen of Lord Clare"s speeches between 1793 and 1800, will give a clearer insight into the Irish problem than a bushel of books about the Vendean or any other episode of the Revolution.
Equally frivolous is it, for any useful purpose of practical enlightenment, to draw parallels between the action of the Catholic clergy in Ireland to-day and that of the French clergy on the eve of the Revolution. There is no sort of force in the argument that because the French clergy fared ill at the Revolution,[1] therefore the Irish clergy will fare ill when self-government is bestowed on Ireland.
Such talk is mere ingenious guess-work at best, without any of the foundations of a true historical a.n.a.logy. The differences between the two cases are obvious, and they go to the heart of the matter. For instance, the men who came to the top of affairs in France were saturated both with speculative unbelief for one thing, and with active hatred of the Church for another. In Ireland, on the contrary, there is no speculative unbelief, as O"Connell used so constantly to boast; and the Church being poor, voluntary, and intensely national and popular, has nourished none of those gross and swollen abuses which provoked the not unreasonable animosity of revolutionary France.
In truth, it is with precisely as much or as little reason that most of the soothsayers and prognosticators of evil take the directly opposite line. Instead of France these persons choose, as they have an equally good right to do, to look for precedents to Spain, Belgium, or South America. Why not? They a.s.sure us, in their jingling phrase, that Home Rule means Rome Rule, that the priests will be the masters, and that Irish autonomy is only another name for the reign of bigotry, superst.i.tion, and obscurantism. One of these two mutually destructive predictions has just as much to say for itself as the other, and no more. We may leave the prophets to fight it out between them while we attend to our business, and examine facts and probabilities as they are, without the aid of capriciously adopted precedents and fantastical a.n.a.logies.
[Footnote 1: The Church did not fare so very ill, after all. The State, in 1790, undertook the debts of the Church to the tune of 130,000,000 livres, and a.s.sured it an annual Budget of rather more than that amount.--Boiteau"s _Etat de la France_, p. 202.]
Parallels from France, or anywhere else, may supply literary amus.e.m.e.nt; they may furnish a weapon in the play of controversy. They shed no light and do no service as we confront the solid facts of the business to be done. Lewis the Fourteenth was the author of a very useful and superior commonplace when he wrote: "No man who is badly informed can avoid reasoning badly. I believe that whoever is rightly instructed, and rightly persuaded of _all the facts_, would never do anything else but what he ought." Another great French ruler, who, even more than Lewis, had a piercing eye for men and the world of action, said that the mind of a general ought to be like a field-gla.s.s, and as clear; to see things exactly as they are, _et jamais se faire des tableaux_,--never to compose the objects before him into pictures. The same maxim is nearly as good for the man who has to conquer difficulties in the field of government; and a.n.a.logies and parallels are one way of subst.i.tuting pictures for plans and charts. Just because the statesman"s problem is individual, history can give him little help. I am not so graceless as to depreciate history or literature either for public or for private persons. "You are a man," Napoleon said to Goethe; and there is no reason why literature should prevent the reader of books from being a man; why it should blind him to the great practical truths that the end of life is not to think but to will; that everything in the world has its decisive moment, which statesmen know and seize; that the genius of politics, as a great man of letters truly wrote, has not "All or Nothing" for its motto, but seeks on the contrary to extract the greatest advantage from situations the most compromised, and never flings the helve after the hatchet. Like literature the use of history in politics is to refresh, to open, to make the mind generous and hospitable; to enrich, to impart flexibility, to quicken and nourish political imagination and invention, to instruct in the common difficulties and the various experiences of government; to enable a statesman to place himself at a general and s.p.a.cious standpoint. All this, whether it be worth much or little, and it is surely worth much, is something wholly distinct from directly aiding a statesman in the performance of a specific task. In such a case an a.n.a.logy from history, if he be not sharply on his guard, is actually more likely than not to mislead him. I certainly do not mean the history of the special problem itself. Of that he cannot possibly know too much, nor master its past course and foregone bearings too thoroughly. Ireland is a great standing instance. There is no more striking example of the disastrous results of trying to overcome political difficulties without knowing how they came into existence, and where they have their roots. The only history that furnishes a clue in Irish questions is the history of Ireland and the people who have lived in it or have been driven out of it.
ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE.[1]